Master Chief is back. But not for me

One of the most endearing and memorable characters ever created in the video gaming industry has returned after a break of five years. Master Chief is back and is looking good.

Halo 4 launched in India day on Monday. If you are a video gaming enthusiast I am sure you don’t need to be told about Halo. But for the benefit of newbies – or should we call them noobies, my fellow gamer — let me quickly summarize Halo.

Halo arrived in 2001 and immediately caught the fancy of video gamers.

It was unique and radical in the way it approached video gaming and it changed the industry in a significant way. Nowadays, most games come with features like regenerative health and only two or three weapons at a time. It was Halo that started the trend. The game was so successful that it single-handedly propped up Microsoft’s Xbox, which at that time was a new product and was trying to compete with Sony’s mighty Playstation 2.

Rishi Alwani, a gaming journalist who knows his Halo and Call of Duty like back of his hands, summarizes Halo’s importance –

“Halo was first game to show that first person shooters can work on consoles. It was slick, packaged very well and had a gameplay that changed video games forever. The most radical bit about Halo was ‘five-minute theory’ that its developers put in the game. This means there was intense action for around five minutes, a few moments of respite, and then again action. The game was paced very well. Titles launched after Halo often used the same technique.”

But more than its sales and the unique gameplay, Halo added the epic – read it with a capital E – and grandeur to video gaming. And I am not talking about the superb background score that really set the pace in the game. Yes, the Halo music theme was – and remains – epic. Set in the future, Halo gave birth to the Halo universe. Eleven years later the Halo universe is one rich world, full of tales of heroism, betrayal, love, and a clash of the civilizations on a galactic scale. It is the Lord of The Rings of video games.

The story of Halo, revealed over a period of several years with video games and companion novels, is too grand to be captured in words. To really understand the magnitude of Halo series, you have to play the game. But I will try.

It all starts with Forerunners, a very advanced race of aliens that ruled the galaxy a long time ago. Forerunners faced the challenge from Flood, a parasitic alien race with a goal of ultimately consuming every living being in the Universe, and found the going difficult. So, they decide to take the ultimate step – kill themselves as well as any one other living race in the Universe so that Flood can be deprived of its food. With all their knowledge and resources Forerunners built several Halos, massive ring-shaped structures, and trapped Flood in them. For the Halos, they created an Ark, a sort of control room from where the rings could be activated to create Halo Array, which had the potential to destroy life from the Universe. After that, Forerunners apparently vanished.

Fast forward to 26th century. Humans have established a force called UNSC (United Nations Space Command), which patrols the space as well as takes care of the several colonies that mankind has established on other planets. These colonies come under attack from Covenants, a group of disparate alien races, headed by Prophets. Prophets are very religious and they worship Forerunners. They are also very shrewd and manipulative, adept at brainwashing other aliens. That’s how they have gathered several alien races under their banner. But at the same time, they are also very dogmatic and foolish. They believe Halos have some sort of holy purpose and want to locate the Ark so that they can activate the Halo Array. They don’t know that Halo Array is going to wipe out life from the Universe.

Master Chief is a UNSC soldier but with a twist. He is a cybernetically-enhanced supersoldier. As a character, he doesn’t talk much. Instead he believes in letting his gun do the talking. In Halo series he usually works with Cortana, a smart virtual assistant.

Master Chief and Covenant first clash when a UNSC spaceship is attacked by aliens. It crashes into a Halo, Flood is released accidentally and chaos ensues. Three games and several epic battles later, which see humans and several alien races learning the true nature of the Ark, the story culminates in the defeat of the Prophets and the near elimination of the Flood.

Halo 4, the fourth game in the series, starts from where the story ends in Halo 3. Master Chief and Cortana, while floating in space in a half-broken ship, end up on a Forerunner planet. This kicks off the fourth game.

Over the years Halo has acquired a cult status and an iconic following. For example, Master Chief became so popular that Madame Tussauds in Las Vegas created his wax replica.

I played my first Halo game in 2004 on a PC and since then I have followed the series thoroughly. I did not play Halo 3, though, as it never arrived on computers.

This is the same reason why even when I welcome the coming back of Master Chief, I am not standing in the line to buy Halo 4.

There is lot of videogame politics in the industry and as much as I like Halo games, I don’t want to subscribe to the views of companies like Microsoft and Sony, which not only create exclusive games for their own gaming consoles but probably also tacitly force game developers to not support other gaming-platforms like computers. Of course, this is to sell more consoles, which is perfectly reasonable business decision.

But my problem with this approach is that the PC is technologically the better platform for video gaming. It has the hardware that is now six years ahead of console hardware. With its keyboard and mouse, this is also the best platform for first-person shooters like Halo games.

But just because Halo 4 is created by a studio owned by Microsoft, which rather unapologetically also claims the ownership of the PC platform, the game is only available on Xbox 360. The argument is that for Microsoft, it is all about business and if you want to play a game you should buy Xbox. I have no problem with this assertion. My only issue is, as I highlighted earlier, that the PC is technically superior to consoles. By undermining it, companies like Microsoft and Sony hold back the full potential of what is possible in video gaming and the experience that video gamers can have.

Well, enough with my Luddite views.

I played a bit of Halo 4 during the game’s launch in Delhi and I can say that Master Chief still strikes the same amount of terror among the grunts and elites which he did when he arrived on the scene in 2001. If you are not a PC purist like me and own an Xbox 360, Halo 4 is must-play game. Just like other Halo games, it’s an EPIC. That is E-P-I-C!

Author

Javed Anwer is a geek at heart, a man of gizmos, gadgets and games. He spends the better part of his nights, and sometimes days too, roaming the virtual alleys of WWW. When he is not on the Internet, he is most likely tweaking his computer to coax more out of it. When he is not doing any of these, he writes for The Times of India. In this blog, WebWise, he tries to document his rendezvous with technology.

Javed Anwer is a geek at heart, a man of gizmos, gadgets and games. He spends the better part of his nights, and sometimes days too, roaming the virtual all. . .